Saturday, February 19, 2011

What do you say to a Minecraft Griefer?

As a new recruit to Twitter I still have only a small number of followers and I check out each one personally. Some are just spammy link lists but others are interesting feeds that I am happy to subscribe to in return.

Today I was somewhat taken aback to see that one of my latest followers was a dedicated MineCraft griefer with their own Youtube channel advertising their destructive exploits. The whole concept of Minecraft griefing upsets and annoys me but mostly it just baffles me. Minecraft is a glorious game of creativity and greifing does nothing but hurt people by destroying their creations. Minecraft griefing is the computer equivalent of kicking over a child's sandcastle and I really don't understand how anyone with a modicum of intelligence could enjoy doing it.

Anyway how to respond to this persons joining my Twitter feed? Should I:

a) Give in to my immediate urge to give them a piece of my mind on both Twitter and Youtube.
b) Try to talk directly to them to try and convince them of the error of their ways.
c) Just ignore them and block them on Twitter.

Option "a" appealed to my baser instincts but on mature reflection I decided against it. I am not very good at abuse and I would probably only make a fool of myself. I was even tempted by option "b" for a while. A certain naive innocence within me still clings to the notion that all those people you meet on the internet must be nice decent individuals deep down if you really get to know them. Ultimately though my parenting experience asserted itself. Antisocial habits in children are often just attention seeking behaviour and giving the child attention because of those habits is simply perpetuating the behaviour.